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Mom and I are finally on our way into the outreaches of China now. We started our trip by taking a night train from Dalian to Beijing, where we had two hours until we had to be at the airport for our flight. In our brief time gap, Mom went to our friend Betsy's house for the last time before Betsy and family move back to Gig Harbor. I, knowing I would see them again in August, decided to go back to the hostel where Julie and I stayed last month and visit my friend Xiao Yue. He came down the stairs to where I was waiting for him in the lobby and his face just lit up! It was so sweet! He wasn't expecting me at all and he immediatly took charge telling me to put my things down, then set off to make me tea and noodles, all the while continuing to deal with customers. He also insisted on helping me get to the airport. Over the next hour, we hardly had time to talk at all because he was so busy trying to take care of me, it was really sweet. In the end, he hooked me up with another guy going to the airport and we separated once again, hopefully to meet up once more the day before I come back to the states.
The cab ride was another incident all together. The guy Xiao Yue had hooked me up with was a British dude a couple years older than myself and the two of us gossiped about travel all the way to the airport. I was surprised to find out that he had once had a girlfriend from Oregon and so was quite familiar with the Northwest. What fascinating people fellow travellers can be!
Ok, so on to Kunming. It is quite a comfortable city. Mom and I flew in, set ourselves up in a hostel and set out to discover the town. We started out in the general direction of a big lake that was supposed to be nice, and ended up wandering through the bustling city center, by two mosques and into the wonderful "flower and bird market" on the way. We got some great street food there. The lake was quite pleasant too when we finally arrived there.
The next day, we took a minibus a couple hours out of town to see Shilin, the Stone Forest. It was a wonderful chunk of the countryside that was covered in giant limestone "karsts" that were quite literally " a forest." We got ourselves lost among them, on purpose, because that's all you CAN do honestly. We knew there were stones with names on them, but it was a long time before we found them. "Immortal Turtle" caught mom's eye, and we followed some signs to "Mother and Son." My favorite was "Camel on top of an Elephant," because, quite surprisingly, it DID look like exactly that. It was a great day trip from the city.
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